“Man (1 Tim. 2:5), so that the Incomprehensible, otherwise inaccessible to the physical because of the incomprehensibility of His nature, not only became accessible through the body; but also sanctified man by Himself, becoming like leaven for the whole mixture, freed the whole man from condemnation, uniting with Himself the condemned, becoming for all everything that constitutes us, except for sin — body, soul, mind — all that death penetrated. And the sum of all this is man, who in contemplative reason is the visible God.”
In Orthodoxy
The path to deification lies through mystical experience, prayer, the ascent of the mind to God, through standing before God in contemplative prayer. It is a term formed in Orthodoxy that characterizes the ultimate goal of Christian life. A goal that does not end with bodily life, but leads to abiding with God in eternal life. In the sacrament of baptism, God sows the seed of a new human nature in a person, and nourished by the grace of the sacrament of the Eucharist and others, and by the moral perfection of the Christian, it grows, transforming the person. And again He said, Whereunto shall I liken the kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.
Luke 13:20–21
To the simple question of the apostles: “Who then can be saved?” Jesus Christ replied simply: “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible,” revealing to the disciples the tropos He was accomplishing. Therefore, when “Jesus, knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, said, I thirst,” “accomplished” means that the human nature of Jesus Christ had already sanctified the inhabited earth and would become a “new creation,” united with the Divine nature in the sense of the Hypostasis. Christ is saved, the God-man will rise — “that the Scripture might be fulfilled.” How it came to be that Jesus Christ rose again, what the Lord did with His human nature in the world, and how its deification — salvation by God — was accomplished (of which the resurrection is the testimony) — this action does not belong to ministry and tradition but to the practice (action) of deification by the holy fathers, who accomplished their salvation by deifying their human nature — their body.